Sports

SPORTS

SPORTS. Sport was an essential and socially significant pastime in the early modern world, an arena in which individual identity and ability were expressed by king and milkmaid alike. Capable sportsmanship at tennis, jousting, and even wrestling were increasingly perceived as the markings of a strong monarchy, which determined the athletic displays and rites of passage that prevailed in an aristocratic court. The sporting culture, in turn, was philosophically sanctioned by many humanists who extolled the "gentlemanlike pastimes" of swimming, archery, swordplay, and horseback riding as valuable components of any elite education.

Peasants and those of the lower orders also engaged in sport for their own purposes, reinforcing community cohesion by carving out their own particular spheres of play. Not all sport was universally embraced, however, and over the course of the period Puritans and others began to lament the "devilish" activity that joined other activities such as drinking, gambling, and dancing to produce "moral degeneracy." Nevertheless, sport prevailed against these assaults and emerged from the period more varied and popular than ever.

In the Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) set the tone through his admonitions regarding proper court behavior and etiquette, in which sport occupied—at least for males—a central and elevated position. Sport, however, was conceived by such writers in very different terms than those who came before (or perhaps since). For them, personal skill at a game such as archery was offset by the concept of Fortuna ('Lady luck'), a capricious goddess who determined the tides and turns of one's own personal luck. Sport was also imbued with a humanist regard for man, his body as well as his soul. According to Castiglione, the perfect man at court was "well built and shapely of limb," and displayed his physical capabilities by excelling at games of war—archery, horsemanship, and swordplay—as well as less martial physical activity, notably swimming, running, throwing, and jumping. Especially in games of mock war, such as jousting, the point was to achieve individual distinction on a physical level, as one performed on a stage that recalled traditions of military triumph. Even kings entered the game in this sense, as was the case with the famous encounter on the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, when Henry VIII of England engaged Francis I of France in a wrestling match, alongside other gaming activities.

Despite its dangers and the increasing obsolescence of mounted and armored warfare on the battlefield, jousting sports continued to flourish in the form of fencing, which witnessed a shift to the long thin-bladed rapier and the use of point and the lunge, and with it an increasing emphasis on speed, dexterity, and technique. Another sport in which actual weapons figured prominently was archery, which sustained its popularity even as the bow and arrow became increasingly archaic in war. According to Roger Ascham (1515–1568) in 1546, "How honest a pastime for the mind [is archery]; how wholesome an exercise for the body; not vile for great men to use, not costly for poor men to sustain." Finally, horses also continued in their martial importance, as they were used in the hunt, and in races such as the Italian palio and in England during annual competitions. Dressage, which was an extremely difficult, technical, disciplined—and time-bound—form of classical riding, was undertaken by military academies, though it, too, enjoyed a reputation as a more elevated sporting spectacle, and one that reinforced and perhaps played out social hierarchies in presenting the mounted rider—according to one Tudor writer—as a force of "majesty and dread to inferior persons." At the same time, the increasing precision of horsemanship, in the form of dressage, reflected a greater emphasis on uniformity and mathematical rules, as reflected in the writings of Descartes or by the early modern military shift to the use of drill.

Other activities enjoyed by the upper levels of society included tennis, which became the sport of kings such as Henry VIII, most notably, and was referred to in the writings of Erasmus, More, and Montaigne (with the latter's brother dying after being hit in the head with a tennis ball—no trivial accident when balls were frequently decried as too hard). After 1600, however, tennis declined in popularity, though it continued to ebb and flow in the elite consciousness alongside the new sport of golf.

Meanwhile, though football and related communal games tended to be spurned by elites and their writers, the similar game of càlcio ('soccer') flourished in Italy, allowing gentlemen, in the words of Cardinal Silvio Antoniano, to appear "more erect and more eager, and [enabling] them to meet sadness and depression with unruffled brow." Like other sports of the day, càlcio was affected by increasing bureaucratic intervention and mathematical quantification, as rules were drawn up to establish standards of play as well as objective and (increasingly) recorded scoring systems.

While sport among the elite was lauded by religious and secular leaders, sport among the lower orders was subject to greater condemnation on the part of authorities, who might have feared the disruptive and violent potential it could contain. The church and civic officials had long attempted to curtail football and other peasant games, with writers such as Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?–1546) advocating that football, in particular, be "put in perpetual silence." Urban footballers, or those who practiced their exertions near churches, were particularly odious to churchwardens, city administrators, and other leaders, who understandably feared the destruction of property. The "bloody and murdering" practice of football continued, however, in spite of Puritan hostility and denunciation, and despite the increasingly restricted fields that were fenced in after the enclosure movement in England. While games were allowed within proscribed time periods and special festival occasions such as Shrove Tuesday or May Day, the community- and identity-reinforcing benefits of sports proved too enticing for villagers and townspeople alike.

Such attachments were due in part to the fact that certain sports were so embedded in the peasant tradition, where football—usually involving two opposing teams that kicked or threw the ball against the opponents' goals—extended back centuries. In England the game had mythical origins, with claims that it had originated among Roman legionnaires in Britain, or later, among Saxons. Whatever the truth, the term futball first appears in records of the fourteenth century, with indications that the sport had already existed for a while. Similar to football, but more like modern-day soccer, was the game known in France as la soule à pied, which also extended back to the Middle Ages and involved opposing villages or specifically designated individuals competing to propel a leather ball forward by feet alone. Shouler à la crosse —which would evolve, with American Indian contributions, into modern lacrosse—involved similar feats using sticks, while the stick-based game of hockey—derived either from the French hocquet, meaning 'shepherd's staff', or the Anglo-Saxon hoc, meaning 'hook'—also originated in the Middle Ages.

Less physically taxing than fencing or football, though perceived as sport by upper and lower orders alike, were gambling games and related pastimes such as cockfighting. Though an ancient and universal game, dicing in early modern Europe continued its popularity and used the familiar cubed objects rather than the original knucklebones, though some dice were carved in the image of men or beasts. German mercenaries called landsknechts (literally, 'servants of the country') were particularly renowned dicing gamblers of the time, while knights and ladies, along with children and villagers, also continued to participate. Not surprisingly, objections were raised by Puritans, although enforcement of prohibitions was uneven. Gambling was not simply a "profane exercise" but also quite clearly a sin and banned in places such as John Calvin's Geneva. As one epigrammatic writer put it in 1636, the banning of sport and games resulted in "dull iron times" that made one long for "the Golden Age's Glories." Restrictions were subsequently eased, however, in reaction to the failed suppression of sport; partly as a result, the eighteenth century witnessed a veritable explosion of games and gambling, which continued, as they already had, to provide a sphere in which to exhibit, perform, show off, display physical prowess, and fashion one's identity through the kick of a ball, the lunge of a sword, or the roll of Fortuna -imbued dice.

See also Aristocracy and Gentry ; Castiglione, Baldassare ; Cities and Urban Life ; Court and Courtiers ; Enclosure ; Festivals ; Gambling ; Games and Play ; Humanists and Humanism ; Hunting ; Peasantry ; Popular Culture ; Puritanism ; Tournament .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baker, William J. Sports in the Western World. Totowa, N.J., 1982.

Cox, R. W. History of Sport: A Guide to the Literature and Sources of Information. Frodsham, U.K., 1994.

Dunning, Eric. Sport Matters: Sociological Studies of Sport, Violence, and Civilization. London and New York, 1999.

Mason, Tony, ed. Sport in Britain: A Social History. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.

Sarah Covington